Wonder31 #6: Espresso

I've committed {to myself} to interpret the first seven Wonder31 Prompts and then decide whether I will keep going. The thing is that I am not a prompt-doer, I'm a prompt-writer, a prompt-designer, prompt-thinker-upper... or a prompt-o-matic. Usually I set constraints and challenges for myself in my work, as I do a series or a challenge or whatever. But this is intentionally working to interpret a prompt and it's a new ballgame.

So how did I interpret espresso? Well I drank my second cup of java {but not espresso} and brainstormed. I contemplated painting a page with variations of brown & sepia watercolors, but didn't feel like getting out the watercolors. I pondered stripes of acrylics but don't have any brown and... well as they say, one excuse is as good as another. Yet I thought about coffee, coffee beans, about waking up the first full day of the Lake Como leg of our Italy trip, and the decadent cappuccino at breakfast at the tiny inn. About innumerable hours huddled with my headphones with a trusty Moleskine and a handful of black pens at coffee shops.

My art for this prompt is really super simple, a 3x5" index card about those espresso-filled hours drawing and listening... drawn with a dip pen and my favorite sepia ink, J. Herbin Lie de Thé. And the dip pen and ink launched a page of rainbow patterns in a bunch of different J. Herbin inks.

When you brainstorm your "take" on each of the prompts, remember that you can start with a simple spark, something that pops into your mind, and make it into something bigger. Take the word, spin it around, turn it upside down. Find the connections to the threads of your life, your habits, your hobbies, your favorite things, your experiences. Hate coffee? Always feel like the odd duck when your friends want to get together at Starbucks? Write about that. Or write about the first time you had coffee.

Here's my first coffee experience. I should preface this by saying that my parents didn't drink coffee. My mom drank tea, so I was a tea drinker. When I was in college, I had an internship one winter at Exxon in Maryland. We traveled each week to do accounting related things. 80% of these things, although related to my major, were boring things {and 20% fascinating}. The people I worked with were older and really into accounting. We worked long days doing these things and ate dinner r-e-a-l-l-y late. I had no say-so in anything. By mid afternoon I was a) freezing cold, in my charcoal gray suit, b) starving, c) sleepy, d) bored. There were dual coffee pots filled with hours old burnt coffee, Adjacent, styrofoam cups, powdered creamer & plastic stir sticks. Or maybe they were wooden, I don't remember. The coffee was multi-functional and fixed a-d above.

Above, two page spreads from 2012 that are all about coffee. I sense a recurring theme, or else I've begun to repeat myself.